The hijinks and horrors of boot camp

OCS definitely counts. I salute you. :wink:

What you are describing is not correction. That’s a good ol’ fashioned shark attack. A shark attack is usually when the boot first shows up. Its to let everyone know they are not in Kansas anymore and life as they knew it is over. Any real corrections would indeed be done one on one. The volume might still be high but the point would be clear.

I don’t recall if there was a trench or other ground pit for a mishandled grenade to be tossed into during our training. To my way of thinking, the best way to get the grenade out of the bunker was to toss it over the concrete wall. If somehow your aim was bad and it hit the wall and came back at you, or you dropped it, I’m not sure that trying to re-establish physical connection to the live grenade to force it into the secondary designated position is the best option at that point.

The failsafe, at least as I recall it, was the concrete lip you had to step over to get into the bunker. I believe that is your secondary safety option. You exit the bunker post-haste, or the DI tosses you out of the bunker and you are lying flat on the ground behind a thick plug of concrete. You might get concussed from the noise, but at least no flying shrapnel could get at you.

Someone with more experience or perhaps a different set-up than the one we had might be able to shed additional light.

I was in the Army, and I remember reading on an Internet forum years later “The only people who have Boot Camp stories are National Guard or Reserve guys” because the idea is that everything that comes after boot camp is so much more memorable.

I bring that up because I really don’t even remember it that well though there are still a few things that stuck with me. There was an Uber-Christian dude who got offended me and some guys were swapping girlfriend stories about the women we left back home, you know the “And the night before I got here she got on all fours and…” stories. He threatened to report us to the drill instructor so we stopped though we weren’t afraid we just found his complaints annoying. I also heard a DI in our brother Platoon (is that the name for it?) got in trouble for taking showers with the recruits. Apparently the guy thought it would be easier to take a shower at work than at home, save him some time. There was a lot of drama over it from what I remember but he remained as part of our brother Platoon.

I read an anecdote about one soldier who later became a commissioned officer and then he ordered his former boot-camp drill sergeant (an NCO) to drop and give him pushups. Unfortunately, his higher-ups responded to this by yanking his commission.

My Best Friend from High School who went into the Air Force right after graduation sent me a picture of him right after the shave…

He was unrecognizable. Looked like a 40 year old man. Maybe it was the bad lighting. Nah…

That of course is bullshit. A commission can only be taken away as part of a punishment give under court martial.

It was the Singaporean army, not the USA. But yeah, maybe the story was BS.

The military is a great place for urban legends. I’m sure that’s true in any military.

Example of Navy recruit notebook:

For reasons I cannot recall, I kept two of those; one I carried around with me and one that stayed in my locker. It wasn’t until I went through my things at home after the Navy decided they didn’t want me that I discovered somebody had tried to play a trick on me. In one of the notebooks, scrawled in all-caps, was a sentence saying that I hate the commander of the Motivational Training Unit.

Thing is, whoever did that chose the wrong notebook and the commander never saw it.

I was one of the last draftees, and remember hating it with every molecule of my being, but still liking it more than high school.

In Basic Training, my platoon had this real character for one of our drill sergeants. He was a little crazy but super funny and the whole company knew who Drill Sergeant Gallimore was. He was an E-5 and the story was that he was in the Marines in Vietnam and every time he got Staff Sergeant, he’d make sure do something to get kicked back to E-5. Not sure about the truth to all of that, but he was pretty wacky. He would say things like “This ain’t Arby’s, you can’t have it your way” and “No stupid!” in a very distinctive way.

One morning towards the end of Basic, we were preparing for Common Skills testing and Drill Sergeant Hall was putting tape with numbers on our helmets to identify us for the event. Some private asked DS Hall some goofball question, interrupting Hall’s task. I yelled at the private “No stupid! Get out of here yardbird!” in a perfect imitation of DS Gallimore.

DS Hall stopped dead in his tracks and looked around. “Who said that?” he demanded.

I thought that I was going to be in deep trouble for this, but I also wasn’t going to get the whole platoon in trouble by keeping silent so I answered “I did, Drill Sergeant.”

DS Hall barely looked at me and said “Damn, you sound just like Gallimore” and went back to taping a helmet.

But drill sergeants have their own showers in the day rooms. He’ a creep.

This one stuck with me.

The Drills had a training schedule and time limits we were not aware of. Of course they had to keep things moving. During instruction they would ask if anyone had any questions. They weren’t monsters. If someone had a serious question they would help the soldier to understand. Too many times there was a stupid what if question from someone who watched too many movies. They only had time to teach the basics and had to move on. One of the Drills in a different platoon had the solution. Once someone started asking, “What if this was during a nuclear attack and he has a sucking face wound?” the DS would yell “ First Platoon! What If!” In unison they would reply “What if you shut the fuck up!” This stuck with me because I could have used that during a multitude of meetings throughout my life.

I would imagine playing those kinds of gotcha games, while they could sometimes serve a purpose (c.f. Hartman questioning Joker’s stated non-love of the Virgin Mary in FMJ), may, if done far too often, sour the recruit on the notion that his superiors know wtf they are doing and have their best interests at heart. You don’t want an entire platoon of soldiers who have been engrained to think their noncoms if not officers are total douchebags if not idiots. See also Capt. Sobel from SPR.

So this happened to me in Jump School and not Basic Training (so I hope it’s still acceptable :grin:)

Ft. Bragg was the second place that I got stationed, I was in Turkey first for just over a year before getting orders to go back stateside. Bragg (Now called Ft. Liberty) is Home of the Airborne and just about all of the units there, including 82nd Airborne, XVIII Airborne Corps, and US Army Special Operations Command, are Airborne units. I was assigned to a smaller Special Operations signal battalion – basically any piece of comm gear a Green Beret would take in the field I would have set up at a base station or some other fixed location. I was not Airborne qualified when I got there but every time someone asked me if I wanted to go to Jump School, I answered in the affirmative.

I finally got orders and I drove to Ft. Benning to attend the school. My Sergeant Airborne, like many of the other instructors there, had a Ranger tab and I was there with a Special Forces unit patch on my arm. I got hazed a bit for it but I felt I could take it. You would normally think that Army training is like Basic with a drill instructor yelling at the privates and making them do pushups all the time but Jump School was different. They only made us do 10 push-ups at a time for some reason and the instructors were funny. The actual operation of jumping out of an airplane was serious but everything up to that was open for the Black Hats to clown us or crack jokes.

We get to a point where we are practicing Parachute Landing Falls on the Lateral Drift Apparatus. From a 6-foot platform, the trainee would hold onto a contraption that slid down a cable, the instructor would call out right or left, and the trainee would have to drop and do a PLF on the corresponding side. The Black Hat was screwing with us a bit and was giving people No-goes for whatever reason. We needed X number of Goes to pass but practice builds muscle memory, so we did a lot of these.

Finally, Sergeant Airborne tells me I’m a “Go” for one of my falls and I jump up to my feet, pump my arm, and yell “Special Forces!”

Sergeant Airborne looks at me “What the Hell, Special Forces?” He yells. “Drop and give me push-ups.”

So I drop right there and start cranking them out. “One, Sergeant Airborne! Two Sergeant Airborne!”

I get up to 8 push-ups and he yells at me “What the hell are you doing in my drop zone? Get the hell out of my drop zone and give me push-ups!”

I hop up to my feet “Yes Sergeant Airborne!” And run away from the training area, drop down, and started cranking out more push-ups.

I got to 8 again and he yells “Not there! I told you to get out of my DZ!” So I jump up again and yell “Yes Sergeant Airborne!” again and I run out of the sawdust pit of the training area and start doing push-ups again.

“Not there! There!”

“Yes Sergeant Airborne!”

“Not there! There!”

“Yes Sergeant Airborne!”

“Not there! There!”

“Yes Sergeant Airborne!”

I don’t know how many push-ups I actually did, he finally called me to get back in line for training. I double timed it back to line and all the other trainees were stifling laughter, he was smirking as he looked at me, and all the other Black Hats in the area were cracking up.

I knew a man who was in the military back in the 1950s, and he had a barracks-mate upon whom Bubba from “Forrest Gump” might have been based. One day, he walked in and saw “Bubba” sitting on his bunk sobbing like a little kid, and he asked what was wrong. Bubba eventually calmed down enough to tell him that nothing was wrong, and in fact the opposite was true: It was the first time in his life that he’d ever had shoes in the summer, and now he had three pairs - two pairs of combat boots and a pair for his dress uniform.

This man thought he’d grown up poor, but he’d never gone without shoes in the summer.

A person doesn’t need to be blind-drunk to make a life-changing error with a grenade. You’re a bit hung over, you’re a half-second too slow to react to the sound of the spoon disengaging, and boom, it’s too late.

Just remembered this guy. For some reason we skewed older than usual for a Basic Training unit. I was about to be 21 which would be usual for most recruits but there were older guys. This one guy had been in the Army before. Got up to SGT/E5 and got out. He had been out long enough that he had to go through basic again. He had a wife and kids. The reason why he got back in? Teeth. His teeth were like withered stumps. Imagine the worst teeth you can and you might be close. Of course his breath smelled like death. Looking back I’m surprised he passed the physical but the Army let him back in with a promise to give him new teeth when he got to his premenant unit. He was a nice enough guy but definitely a bumpkin. We peppered him with questions about what the real Army was like. I don’t know why I remember this but he was an 88M/truck driver.

My first day in the Army and my recruiter drove me to the MEPS station in Des Plaines, IL. There I got herded up with all the other recruits going to Ft. Jackson for Basic and sent to O’Hare for our flight. By pure luck I got seated next to this guy who was kind of big and a little doughy, had glasses, a really bad haircut (it was 89, so a lot of us had those…) and was, in general, a real weirdo.

On the plane, he and I made a little small talk until he told me that last night his girlfriend and her sister made an ice cream sundae out of him and then licked it all off. You could probably understand that I just didn’t make much effort to talk to him after that anecdote. Once we got to Jackson, everyone got their first military haircut, their uniforms issued, and then sorted to our various battalions. This guy is in the same company as me – thankfully not the same platoon – but with his crewcut he looked almost exactly like Private Pyle from Full Metal Jacket and that’s what the drills and the other recruits called him. A few weeks into training and a handful of us were chilling outside of the barracks. Our drills weren’t around and we were lucky to have a quiet moment where we could just hang out and chat. For some reason, Pyle came wandering past us and guys in my group yelled at him to get lost (you know, to maintain unit integrity). He looked back at us with a crazy Pyle smile and told us how lucky we were that he won’t come back and shoot everyone.

I think that was the last time I saw him other than in passing. I assume he graduated with no incidents, and I am sure we would know about it if anything really nutty happened. Hopefully, he went on to AIT and got to enjoy his military career.